Partnerships: Uniting the Public and Private Sectors

Prevention. Mitigation. Response and Recovery. These are the principles of emergency management. Today, the innovation of the private sector with the vast resources of the federal government are joining forces to change the face of emergency response operations.

One such partnership is InfraGard – a national program developed to provide information and intelligence sharing as it relates to the protection of critical infrastructure.  At its core, InfraGard is an association of members dedicated to prevent hostile acts against the United States.  

InfraGard was developed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the Cleveland Field Office in 1996. It was originally designed as a local effort to gain support from the information technology industry and academia to support the FBI’s investigative efforts in the cyber arena. The program expanded to other field offices, and in 1998 the FBI assigned national program responsibility for InfraGard to the former National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) and to the Cyber Division in 2003.

In March 2003, NIPC was transferred to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which now has responsibility for Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) matters. The FBI retained InfraGard as a sponsored program, and works with DHS (and all of its agencies such as FEMA and the USCG), in support of its CIP mission.  While under the direction of NIPC, the primary focus of InfraGard was cyber threats. After September 11, 2001 NIPC expanded its efforts to include critical infrastructures.  

As national security needs have evolved, so have InfraGard’s programs.  The organization now has a formal structure with chapters linked geographically to FBI field offices.  Each chapter has an FBI coordinator assigned to it serving as a liaison with the InfraGard Members Alliance (IMA).  Each IMA is a 501(c) (3) and is governed by a board of directors which is elected by the members.

InfraGard has a national alliance (INMA) that works closely with FBI Headquarters and develops partnerships with other government agencies and business alliances.  For example, the INMA has a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with FEMA.

InfraGard chapters are as different as each state, yet the mission remains the same – to help prevent an incident, cyber-based or physical, and respond to and recover from a disaster , whether man-made or natural, should it occur. 

A typical scenario of how threat information is shared with InfraGard members so that they may prevent themselves from falling prey to a cyber scam is as follows:

Most of the information that is shared is for InfraGard members only due to its sensitivity.  However, there are times, such as in a natural disaster, when the information that is shared can be disseminated publicly.  For example, as part of Infragard’s partnership in Connecticut, an InfraGard member would be located at the State Emergency Operations Center to serve as the liaison with the private sector and would be responsible for disseminating information via all available channels.

To see an example of publicly shared information via InfraGard’s electronic forum, click on the following link which will take you to an alert posted on the InfraGard Connecticut Web site: secure.infragard-ct.org/cgi-bin/public/alertview.pl?rowid=284. 

In New England, there are currently four InfraGard chapters: Boston, Connecticut, Maine and Vermont.  Rhode Island members currently belong to InfraGard CT or InfraGard Boston depending on their needs.  New Hampshire members typically join Massachusetts or Maine. 

InfraGard Quick Facts:

To learn more about InfraGard, visit their Web site at www.infragard.net.  Once you are there, click on the Chapter information and you can learn more about the Chapter in your State or region.

Last Modified: Friday, 02-Nov-2007 11:22:17 EDT